The Close to Home Approach

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The Close to Home Approach

The Close to Home approach engages whole communities in designing solutions and leading social change for domestic and sexual violence prevention.

Based on practices of community organizing and network leadership, everyone plays a role. Youth and adults; people of all genders; family, friends, and neighbors; professionals and politicians all combine their power in an ever-expanding community network. The network becomes unified by a vision for change and organizes actions for engaging others in living that vision, starting now. The experience looks different in every community, by being rooted in what is already powerful or challenging in people’s lives. It is the work of hope, laughter, and possibility, and yet it is also messy, thorny, and both uncomfortably and refreshingly real.

It all starts with believing in a community’s capacity to author its own transformation.

Vision

Vision

Beyond the End of Violence

Community organizing that engages everyone in preventing domestic and sexual violence—and in transforming our lives and communities—requires equal fierceness and hope.

It requires believing in what the world will become beyond the end of violence, when equity and justice are the status quo. It requires holding this belief and future vision in our hearts and minds, so that we can create moments of that future in the present, and invite others to create those moments with us. It requires bringing people together in love, joy, laughter, and acceptance—acknowledging and celebrating that change will take everyone, and leading together for change needed now.

By acting in this way, we become buoyed by the beloved community we are creating. We realize that bold change is possible. And looking at history, we know we are right.

Roots

Roots

Roots

The Close to Home approach began in Dorchester, Massachusetts, United States, through the ideas, actions, and leadership of community members working in affiliation with the organization Close to Home. It continues to evolve through the leadership and experimentation of communities throughout the United States and beyond.